Mssql

Business users kept asking my team for one-off data pulls: how many orders above $150 in December, which products are low on stock, that sort of thing. Every request meant a developer dropping their work to write a throwaway SQL query. So I built a REST API that does the translation instead. It feeds the database schema to an LLM, gets back a SQL query, runs it, and returns JSON. One codebase, four interchangeable providers (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini), switched by a single environment variable.

Getting the Contact Management Application running used to mean installing the .NET SDK, Node, and a local SQL Server, then hoping the versions matched mine. That is three toolchains of setup before anyone sees a login page. Containerizing the stack collapses all of it into docker-compose up --build: the API, the Angular frontend, SQL Server, and an nginx load balancer come up together, wired the same way on every machine. This post walks through the Dockerfiles and compose files that make that work, including the parts I would do differently today.